About us We’re sharing the big picture

  • A program of Geoscience Australia

  • Unlocking archives of satellite imagery

  • Established in 2018

Two young professional women smile at a desktop computer in an open plan office
Satellite with one large solar panel on its side orbiting Earth

Our mission

Why on Earth are we here?

Digital Earth Australia is a program of Geoscience Australia, an agency of the Australian Government. We create free and open satellite data products for the benefit of Australia.
   
It’s our mission to embed satellite imagery and data into decisions that support a sustainable Australian environment, a resilient society and a strong economy.

man looking at image on computer

We provide analysis ready data

Our team are leaders in Earth observation data management

For satellite data to be useful, it needs to be organised, calibrated, and converted into ‘analysis ready data’. 

This pre-processing makes it easy for users to apply the imagery and data to their projects.

Segment of planet Earth from space at night with glowing lights showing

The Open Data Cube started here

We make petabytes of satellite imagery easier to use

The Open Data Cube is the high-performance computing software that gives the public access to the satellite imagery and data we process. It’s also a non-profit, open-source project that’s gone global.   


Bald man in white shirt and tie smiling
We were seeing what the Australians were doing with this new technology and thought it was amazing. A group of us in CEOS thought: we should globalise this and take it to other parts of the world.

Brian Killough

Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Systems Engineering Office, NASA Langley Research Center

Two satellite dishes decorated with first nations American and Australian art

World-class Earth observations from space

Earth observations (EO) from space underpin Australian agriculture, extractive, financial services, infrastructure, and environmental and emergency management industries. 

Geoscience Australia partners with international government and commercial operators to provide EO data and imagery, expert advice, and information for decision makers across its programs and projects.  

 

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We embrace exploration

We work with big picture people

The Digital Earth Australia team is fuelled by diversity and deep expertise. We are Earth observation and data scientists, system engineers, developers, and geospatial analysts. 

We share our work through open access code repositories and scientific journals and have a strong track record of well-cited publications in the Earth observation domain. We embrace a culture of exploration, of continual learning and development, and of collaboration and knowledge sharing.